Public Folder Migration Action Plan

The Excel workbook Public-Folder-Migration-Actionplan-EN.xlsx spreadsheet is supposed to support you during a migration of Legacy Public Folders (Exchange Server 2010) to Modern Public Folders in Exchange Online.

The workbook consists of three spreadsheets:

Overview
The spreadsheet "Overview" is used to define the names of the source and target platform. Additionally, you can define the names of the persons or groups responsible for the on-premises and cloud infrastructure. Those names are used in the second spreadsheet. You can define a start date for the migration project. There is no additonal calculation taking place. The date is just referenced in the second spreadsheet. It's up to your creativity to add automatic calculations. Finally, a summary for each available task status (Open, In Progress, Finished) is provided.

Public Folder Migration
The spreadsheet "Public Folder Migration" contains the top down action plan for migration Legacy Public Folders to Modern Public Folders in Exchange Online. The required tasks are grouped and each task can be assigned and the status can be tracked.

Lookup
This spreadsheet is used to provided the task status lookup values.

If you encounter any issues while preparing for migration or during migration of public folder, I recommend to check the Exchange Server Techcommunity Forum.

Links

Related Posts

Public folders are one solution to provide a team collaboration tool for companies. Legacy public folders utilized a proprietary multi master replication mechanism which was not planned to handle todays data volumes. Therefore, Exchange 2013 introduced modern public folders which utilize the robust DAG replication functionality. Due to the technology change between legacy public folders and modern public folders a migration is required.

You can migrate legacy public folders hosted on Exchange 2007 or Exchange 2010 to modern public folders hosted on Exchange 2013. Or you can migrate legacy public folders hosted on Exchange 2010 to modern public folders hosted on Exchange 2016. If a cloud migration is a viable option for your company, you are able to migrate legacy public folders hosted on Exchange 2007 or Exchange 2010 to modern public folders hosted in Exchange Online.

Since Exchange Server 2013 RTM the public folder migration scripts and the migration guidance have quite often been updated. The information provided at TechNet is very detailed for each migration option and there is no need to repeat each step in this blog post. Please see the link section for all hyperlinks.

Notes

Preparing a legacy public folder migration is pretty straight forward. The main issue companies are facing is the required downtime for finalizing the public folder migration batch. The required downtime cannot be determined exactly (not as exactly as requested by upper management). Which means that you have to plan for a scheduled maintenance during off hours. In the past a single migration request has been used to migrate legacy public folders. The new batch approach migrates public folder content using multiple requests within a single batch.

Estimated Number Of Concurrent Users

The Create-PublicFolderMailboxesForMigration.ps1 script uses the parameter EstimatedNumberOfConcurrentUsers to determine the overall number of public folder mailboxes serving the hierarchy. The TechNet articles explain this parameter as follows:

The estimated number of simultaneous user connections browsing a public folder hierarchy is usually less than the total number of users in an organization.

Exchange Server 2013 and Exchange Server 2016 currently support 2.000 concurrent connections to a single mailbox. This limit (2.000) is used by the Create-PublicFolderMailboxesForMigration.ps1 in conjunction with EstimatedNumberOfConcurrentUsers to determine the number of public folder mailboxes required to serve the public folder hierarchy. The current version of the script uses a coded limit of max 100 public folder mailboxes. This means that you can only serve 100 x 2.000 = 200.000 concurrent users accessing the public folder hierarchy.

Legacy Public Folder Store

Finalizing the migration request and setting the PublicFolderMigrationComplete attribute requires the legacy public folder information store to be restarted. Otherwise the configuration change will not be picked up the information store in timely fashion. Remember to restart the information store service on all legacy public folder servers.

Interim Migration

If your current public folder infrastructure is based on Exchange 2007 and you want to get rid of that Exchange version, you might think of replicating all content to Exchange 2010. This is not the best approach. Due to known content conversion issues you might encounter data loss when replicating public folder content between Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010.

The recommended approach is to migrate Exchange 2007 legacy public folders to Exchange 2013 modern public folders directly.

You need assistance with your Exchange Server setup? You have questions about your Exchange Server infrastructure and going hybrid with Office 365? Contact us at office365@granikos.eu or visit our website https://www.granikos.eu.

It should be noted that most of the tutorials have been written using an Exchange Server lab environment with just a few legacy public folders. Therefore, some readers tend to beleive that you only need one modern public folder mailbox. That is not true. In a large legacy public folder infrastructure you will end up with a multiple public folder mailboxes. And the number of mailboxes required to serve the public folder hierarchy.

A larger public folder migration batch using 66 public folder mailboxes looks like this:

Updates

2016-12-20: Public folder migration batch example added

You need assistance with your Exchange Server setup? You have questions about your Exchange Server infrastructure and going hybrid with Office 365? Contact us at office365@granikos.eu or visit our website https://www.granikos.eu.

When you run your Exchange Organization in hybrid mode with Office 365 and you migrate your on-premise Public Folders to Office 365, you are required to configure a remote Public Folder Mailbox in the Exchange Organization settings.

To be able to add the remote public folder mailbox in a hybrid configuration you are required to add the public folder mailbox (or mailboxes, if you have more than one serving the hierarchy) as a mail user.

Microsoft provides a PowerShell script as part of a script collection here.

The issue with Import-PublicFolderMailboxes.ps1

When you run the Import-PublicFolderMailboxes.ps1 script you might run into the following error:

Links

You need assistance with your Exchange Server setup? You have questions about your Exchange Server infrastructure and going hybrid? You are interested in what Exchange Server 2016 has to offer for your environment?
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Description

This script will generate a report for Exchange 2007/2010 Public Folder Replication. It returns general information, such as total number of public folders, total items in all public folders, total size of all items, the top 20 largest folders, and more. Additionally, it lists each Public Folder and the replication status on each server.

By default, this script will scan the entire Exchange environment in the current domain and all public folders. This can be limited by using the -ComputerName and -FolderPath parameters.

NOTE:
This is an updated version of the Mike Walker (blog.mikewalker.me) to support non-ASCII environments.

Examples

Generate a public folder generation report for public folder \MYPUBLICFOLDER having replicas on servers MXSRV01, MXSRV02, MXSRV03